On Local Government: Did staff let down the General Plan Committee?
by Bob Pinzler
When a resident agrees to join a city commission or committee, they are not expected to be experts in the legalities of the issues they will be asked their opinion on. This is particularly true with respect to the complex and ever-changing area of city planning.
Every 25 years or so, cities revisit their General Plans, which set out the principles for land use, housing development, and open space policies. They are extremely complex documents, juggling the wishes of the local government to create the most felicitous quality of life rules, while state laws try to override them. Most of those laws are aimed at increasing the number of homes available. That is difficult to accomplish in a built-out city like Redondo Beach, but we were tasked to attain the goal.
Having been directly involved with two of these cycles, one in the 1990s as a Councilmember and this past time as a member of the Redondo Beach General Plan Advisory Committee (GPAC), we have incorporated policies which, on the surface, seemed appropriate for the process. In the ’90s, it was mixed-use, where people “lived above the store,” with housing and retail sharing a property. For the most part, that scheme didn’t work. The housing was successful while the retail was not.
So, in this latest iteration, something else was needed to create opportunities to meet ever higher demands for housing units. The concept du jour for this go-round was the overlay zone. Essentially, it provided certain properties with two zoning options. In our case, it was commercial zones that could be converted to housing or, if necessary, share the space between them.
As we were not steeped in the law, we relied upon our consultants and attorneys to advise us of the legality of all the ideas we were coming up with. Other cities were instituting these zones, and it was considered to be a viable alternative to achieve the housing volume we required.
The housing portion of the Redondo Beach General Plan was deliberated and approved by the City Council. It was accepted by the State and was considered implemented when a challenge came in a court filing by a developer using a law known as “Builder’s Remedy,” under which developers can bypass local zoning restrictions and get housing projects approved, even if they don’t fully comply with the city’s zoning rules, as long as the city has not had its General Plan Housing Element certified by the state.
But hadn’t the Council approved the plan and hadn’t it been accepted by the State? A lower court said yes, but last week the Court of Appeals said no. The reason: the overlay zone. The Court said the zone was not a realistic one since it was highly unlikely that this property would ever be used for housing. Thus, the required housing numbers couldn’t be reached, and the State shouldn’t have approved them.
The City still believes they are correct and will likely appeal to the State Supreme Court. However, should they fail, our city will likely be transformed permanently. Then, the question would return to whether those who should have known this new “overlayfad” was untested had the responsibility to inform the GPAC of the potential for failure. We might have arrived at a different solution. ER